Margaret Atwood - Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Every morning, before she left for classes, Ann checked the bathroom for signs of the new man—hairs, cosmetics– but there was nothing. She hardly ever heard him; sometimes there was that soft, barefooted pacing, the click of his lock, but there were no radio noises, no coughs, no conversations. For the first couple of weeks, apart from that one glimpse of a tall, billowing figure, she didn’t even see him. He didn’t appear to use the kitchen, where the mathematicians continued their mysteries undisturbed; or if he did, he cooked while no one else was there. Ann would have forgotten about him completely if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Nolan.

“He’s real nice, not like some you get,” she said to Ann in her piercing whisper. Although she shouted at her husband, when he was home, and especially at her children, she always whispered when she was talking to Ann, a hoarse, avid whisper, as if they shared disreputable secrets. Ann was standing in front of her door with the room key in her hand, her usual location during these confidences. Mrs. Nolan knew Ann’s routine. It wasn’t difficult for her to pretend to be cleaning the bathroom, to pop out and waylay Ann, Ajax and rag in hand, whenever she felt she had something to tell her. She was a short, barrel-shaped woman: the top of her head came only to Ann’s nose, so she had to look up at Ann, which at these moments made her seem oddly childlike.

“He’s from one of them Arabian countries. Though I thought they wore turbans, or not turbans, those white things, like. He just has this funny hat, sort of like the Shriners. He don’t look much like an Arab to me. He’s got these tattoo marks on his face… But he’s real nice.”

Ann stood, her umbrella dripping onto the floor, waiting for Mrs. Nolan to finish. She never had to say anything much; it wasn’t expected. “You think you could get me the rent on Wednesday?” Mrs. Nolan asked. Three days early; the real point of the conversation, probably. Still, as Mrs. Nolan had said back in September, she didn’t have much of anyone to talk to. Her husband was away much of the time and her children escaped outdoors whenever they could. She never went out herself except to shop, and for Mass on Sundays.

“I’m glad it was you took the room,” she’d said to Ann. “I can talk to you. You’re not, like, foreign. Not like most of them. It was his idea, getting this big house to rent out. Not that he has to do the work or put up with them. You never know what they’ll do.”

Ann wanted to point out to her that she was indeed foreign, that she was just as foreign as any of the others, but she knew Mrs. Nolan would not understand. It would be like that fiasco in October. Wear your native costumes. She had responded to the invitation out of a sense of duty, as well as one of irony. Wait till they get a load of my native costume, she’d thought, contemplating snowshoes and a parka but actually putting on her good blue wool suit. There was only one thing native costume reminded her of: the cover picture on the Missionary Sunday School paper they’d once handed out, which showed children from all the countries of the world dancing in a circle around a smiling white-faced Jesus in a bedsheet. That, and the poem in the Golden Windows Reader:

The awful thing, as she told Lelah later, was that she was the only one who’d gone. “She had all this food ready, and not a single other person was there. She was really upset, and I was so embarrassed for her. It was some Friends of Foreign Students thing, just for women: students and the wives of students. She obviously didn’t think I was foreign enough, and she couldn’t figure out why no one else came.” Neither could Ann, who had stayed far too long and had eaten platefuls of crackers and cheese she didn’t want in order to soothe her hostess’ thwarted sense of hospitality. The woman, who had tastefully-streaked ash-blonde hair and a livingroom filled with polished and satiny traditional surfaces, had alternately urged her to eat and stared at the door, as if expecting a parade of foreigners in their native costumes to come trooping gratefully through it.

Lelah smiled, showing her wise tooth. “Don’t they know any better than to throw those things at night?” she said. “Those men aren’t going to let their wives go out by themselves at night. And the single ones are afraid to walk on the streets alone, I know I am.”

“I’m not,” Ann said, “as long as you stay on the main ones, where it’s lighted.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Lelah said. “Don’t you know there was a girl murdered three blocks from here? Left her bathroom window unlocked. Some man climbed through the window and cut her throat.”

“I always carry my umbrella,” Ann said. Of course there were certain places where you just didn’t go. Scollay Square, for instance, where the prostitutes hung out and you might get followed, or worse. She tried to explain to Lelah that she wasn’t used to this, to any of this, that in Toronto you could walk all over the city, well, almost anywhere, and never have any trouble. She went on to say that no one here seemed to understand that she wasn’t like them, she came from a different country, it wasn’t the same; but Lelah was quickly bored by this. She had to get back to Tolstoy, she said, putting out her cigarette in her unfinished cup of instant coffee. (Not strong enough for her, I suppose, Ann thought.)

“You shouldn’t worry,” she said. “You’re well off. At least your family doesn’t almost disown you for doing what you want to do.” Lelah’s father kept writing her letters, urging her to return to Turkey, where the family had decided on the perfect husband for her. Lelah had stalled them for one year, and maybe she could stall them for one more, but that would be her limit. She couldn’t possibly finish her thesis in that time.

Ann hadn’t seen much of her since she’d moved out. You lost sight of people quickly here, in the ever-shifting population of hopeful and despairing transients.

No one wrote her letters urging her to come home, no one had picked out the perfect husband for her. On the contrary. She could imagine her mother’s defeated look, the greying and sinking of her face, if she were suddenly to announce that she was going to quit school, trade in her ambitions for fate, and get married. Even her father wouldn’t like it. Finish what you start, he’d say, I didn’t and look what happened to me. The bungalow at the top of Avenue Road, beside a gas station, with the roar of the expressway always there, like the sea, and fumes blighting the Chinese elm hedge her mother had planted to conceal the pumps. Both her brothers had dropped out of high school; they weren’t the good students Ann had been. One worked in a print shop now and had a wife; the other had drifted to Vancouver, and no one knew what he did. She remembered her first real boyfriend, beefy, easygoing Bill Decker, with his two-tone car that kept losing the muffler. They’d spent a lot of time parked on side streets, rubbing against each other through all those layers of clothes. But even in that sensual mist, the cocoon of breath and skin they’d spun around each other, those phone conversations that existed as a form of touch, she’d known this was not something she could get too involved in. He was probably flabby by now, settled. She’d had relationships with men since then, but she had treated them the same way. Circumspect.

Not that Mrs. Nolan’s back room was any step up. Out one window there was a view of the funeral home next door; out the other was the yard, which the Nolan kids had scraped clean of grass and which was now a bog of half-frozen mud. Their dog, a mongrelized German shepherd, was kept tied there, where the kids alternately hugged and tormented it. (“Jimmy! Donny! Now you leave that dog alone!” “Don’t do that, he’s filthy! Look at you!” Ann covering her ears, reading about underground malls.) She’d tried to fix the room up, she’d hung a Madras spread as a curtain in front of the cooking area, she’d put up several prints, Braque still-lifes of guitars and soothing Cubist fruit, and she was growing herbs on her windowsill; she needed surroundings that at least tried not to be ugly. But none of these things helped much. At night she wore earplugs. She hadn’t known about the scarcity of good rooms, hadn’t realized that the whole area was a student slum, that the rents would be so high, the available places so dismal. Next year would be different; she’d get here early and have the pick of the crop. Mrs. Nolan’s was definitely a leftover. You could do much better for the money; you could even have a whole apartment, if you were willing to live in the real slum that spread in narrow streets of three-storey frame houses, fading mustard yellow and soot grey, nearer the river. Though Ann didn’t think she was quite up to that. Something in one of the good old houses, on a quiet back street, with a little stained glass, would be more like it. Her friend Jetske had a place like that.